Can Someone Please Tell Me How to Talk About Palestine?
I am writing an essay about the dangers of staying silent for fear of being misunderstood, and I am terrified to publish it, for fear of being misunderstood.
It is 2010. I am pacing my shoebox apartment about a mile down from the UC Berkeley campus. I have just learned in my Middle Eastern studies class that 90% of Palestinians don’t have regular access to clean drinking water, because the Israeli military won’t issue them water infrastructure building permits.
“Why is no one talking about this?” I fume. “Israel shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this. Did you know how much money we give them? That country is run by war criminals.”
Rebekah, my college roommate, is bearing witness to this tirade in the opposite corner of the living room. I don’t notice her getting smaller and smaller, until she finally opens her mouth.
“Hey…could you…please be careful how you talk about Israel?”
I stop pacing and look at her. I want to keep being angry, except she is not angry. It takes me a moment to place it. She is frightened.
And I am confused.
Rebekah and I have been friends since middle school. She has the face of a blue-eyed angel, paired with a body that guaranteed she’d never have to pay for a drink unless she really wanted to. She thrifted even though she was rich, drank soymilk before it was cool, and volunteered for the Sierra Club. She was confident, liberal, self-directed, gorgeous, brilliant. I don’t think I’d ever seen her afraid of anything in her entire life.
But here she was, her fingertips rubbing together, as if unsure if she was still in a room with someone she could trust. And the someone was me.
I shook my head at her, not really sure what I had said about imbalanced water rights in a foreign country that was uncareful. But I could tell I had hurt her feelings. And instead of asking, how, exactly, I had done this, I muttered something like “um, OK, fine,” and walked away from her, retreating into our shared bedroom, my stomach turning sour for a reason I couldn’t articulate.
That was the last time we talked about Israel. She never brought it up because I made her uncomfortable. And I never brought it up, either, because I knew it.
We both grew up in an area with a strong Jewish community, north of San Francisco. I danced at Bat Mitzvahs, swam at the JCC, and belted Adam Sandler’s Chanukah Song in the car with friends. Holocaust survivors visited my public school classrooms, rolling up their sleeves and baring their tattoos to rooms of swaddled suburban children, in the hopes we would begin to comprehend what it is like to be treated like livestock being prepped for slaughter. I didn’t realize how rare this was in America.
But despite all of this shared education, there was a fundamental difference between Rebekah and me: when I learned about the Holocaust, I was learning about foreign history. When Rebekah learned about the Holocaust, she was learning about her family.
Rebekah’s great grandfather, and much of her extended family, were killed in Auschwitz. Her father was born a refugee in Singapore, where he was subjected to Japanese internment as a child, before immigrating to San Francisco and working his way up from nothing. He was a staunch Zionist, impressing upon her the need for Jews to have a homeland, because nowhere else on earth was permanently safe. Her sophomore year of college, she would take shrooms with friends, get on a subway train, and proceed to have a hallucination that she was clacking away towards a German gas chamber.
Here is what I did not understand in 2010: in a world that Rebekah was convinced wanted to kill her, Israel was a word that was synonymous with “safety.” For me to criticize Israel was to criticize her safety. This was her reality. Full stop.
The following year, in 2011, I left California for a year of study in post-revolution Cairo. In my dust-coated apartment in Zamalek, my Egyptian boyfriend and I would pass a hookah pipe back and forth while he told me about how Skype calls with his Palestinian half-sister would be cut off mid-sentence during IDF bombing raids. He told me about the white phosphorus that the IDF rained down in Gaza; a substance that I thought was banned by the UN (which is also how I learned the UN was about as useful in armed conflict as a puff of glitter). He dreamed of getting her out of Gaza, but he did not know how. We talked about poverty and abuse, about how you keep going even if you don’t know if someone you love is still alive. He never said the word “Hamas.” I didn’t know who they were.
“Why do you always talk about Jews like they are victims?” he asked me one night.
“Because they were victims of a genocide,” I replied. “Does Egypt teach kids about the Holocaust?”
He shook his head, “I know a little about it, but I don’t think that’s happening now.”
I knew that when he talked about Jewish people, he was actually talking about Israelis. But to him they were the same. I tried to correct him, but he had trouble with it, because he had been raised in a country that had been at war with Israel, and Israel had told him it represented all Jews. We sometimes had these talks with other Jewish-American kids on my program. These kids said things so brazenly disparaging of Israel, I can not repeat them here without getting accused of hate speech. It was a different reality.
I wondered how I would explain it to anyone back home without everyone assuming my Egyptian boyfriend just hated Jews, and my Jewish friends just hated themselves. I couldn’t figure it out. So most of the time, I didn’t try. Like with Rebekah, I simply stopped talking about Israel and Palestine, unless I knew I was already talking to someone who shared my reality, or had the patience and courage to explain their reality to me. I told myself my silence was the result of my being sensitive to others feelings, not because I was being a coward. I tried a little bit. But mostly, I stopped talking at all.
Then October 7, 2023 happened. And suddenly it seemed like everyone started talking at once.
After Hamas’ sadistic killing spree on the Israeli border, the American public entered a freefall conversation about antisemitism, Islamophobia, history, colonization, freedom, foreign policy, and the concept of indigenousness. We all entered this conversation from a different reality, but the one thing I think we can all agree on is this: it has not been going well.
Despite its Tolstoy-length Wikipedia page, some people insist the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not complicated. OK. The feelings involved in it, however, are. They are certainly too nuanced to fit into 280 character tweets and Impact font memes. But the internet is our lives now, and so this is the primary way we have been talking about the conflict: in a digital medium reigned by simplicity at the whims of algorithms that box us into echo chambers. It seems every video, hashtag, and meme that I see about the current crisis in Palestine gets cleanly categorized as “anti-Semitic” or “pro-colonizer.”
The binary is getting worse by the day. We are not having a “conversation.” We are shooting each other with potato cannons of random feelings. We are trying to talk about something nuanced in a medium that turns everything into a right-or-wrong snap judgment.
I believe, to my bones, that nobody wants this conflict to continue, whether we are talking about the endless siege of Gaza, the settler rampages in the West Bank, or the bombs falling over Tel Aviv. Nobody wants this much violence. But we don’t know how to actually talk about it well enough to stop. And as it turns out, not having any way to safely talk about stopping a conflict is just as good as not being interested in doing so, as far as the war machine is concerned. It will happily spurt blood and chew bones, in the name of destiny and self-defense, using our silence as fuel, forever. War profiteers make a lot of money convincing us that if we stop the war machine, we will be in terrible danger. Which is very funny, considering what they sell.
So it is our obligation to try to speak. And to do this, we have to trust each other, even if we aren’t coming from the same generational trauma or education; even if we aren’t coming from the same reality.
I recognize this is a take I get to enjoy from a position of privilege. Which is maybe why I want to share it. I don’t know how much longer I will have it.
America is stretching the definition of hate speech to its absolute breaking point by attempting to classify “Free Palestine” as a remark of hate against the entirety of the world’s Jews. This is a characterization with which, to be clear, many Jews do not agree with, across the political spectrum. Nevertheless, it’s exactly what Project Esther wants to do, it’s what Rep. Gabe Evans recently tried to do, and it’s what Marco Rubio is doing when he digs up the obsolete Immigration Nationality Act of 1952 in order to deport Mahmoud Khalil for organizing pro-Palestine rallies — even though Mahmoud Khalil has a green card.
The attempt to classify support for Palestine as hate speech is a smokescreen; it abuses the noble cause of battling anti-Jewish bigotry to erode free speech and drive us all into fascism (this isn’t even my opinion, I’m parroting it from Israeli-American writer Yoav Litvan, among many, many others).
And it’s going to work. Not because we actually agree with any of it. But because we don’t know how to talk about Israel and Palestine well enough to stop it.
All the Nuance We Cannot Share
There are a lot of slipping points in our collective non-conversation about Israel and Palestine, but this is one of the most fundamental: the words “Zionist” and “anti-Zionist” no longer have consistent meaning. I’m not talking about their dictionary definitions, which are stationary. I’m talking about how they are actually used.
Objectively, Zionism is a 19th century ideological movement that calls for the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine. Israel is Zionism in the flesh.
In modern usage, the word “Zionism” has been flattened to encompass the entirety of Jewish self-determination and safety. But this is only for some people. For others, the word “Zionism” is the name for a settler colonial program whose explicit goal is to wipe Arab Palestinians off the face of Palestine.
That’s a pretty incredible double duty for one word to pull off, but that is what the word “Zionism” is doing these days.
According to Jewish advocacy groups like the AJC or the ADL, the first definition applies. I cannot critique Zionism without being anti-Semitic, because Zionism seeks to save Jews from the violence they had been experiencing across the world for a millennia. Many writers and politicians agree: to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic.
At the same time, organizations like JVP are insistent that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. They hold up this opinion like a sword, using it to cut off any connection between their identity and whatever Israel is doing in their name.
Anti-Zionist Jews are often portrayed as fringe extremists, despite the fact that they have a rich and popular ideological history, especially in the United States. It’s important to note that the existence of anti-Zionist Jews is erased when we use the question “does Israel have a right to exist?” as a litmus test for the presence of Jewish bigotry. (Probably because Israel already does exist, and even if it’s disingenuous to assume everyone who isn’t excited about Zionism hates Jews, the people who question Zionism never seem to have a concise, humane answer to where Israel’s 9 million inhabitants would go if the state itself stopped existing tomorrow. But I digress.)
Back to the language problem: even here, on the far left, the word “anti-Zionism,” has flexible usage. Sometimes, it means “I don’t like what Israel is doing.” Sometimes, it means “I don’t like Israel, at all, and it shouldn’t exist.” Neither of one of those definitions makes me anti-Semitic, however. In fact, according to anti-Zionist Jews, assuming all Jews support Zionism is actually what’s anti-Semitic.
I’m being glib, I know. There are many wise journalists, in many nuanced articles, detailing how, when and why anti-Zionism is or is not anti-Semitism. Yair Rosenberg, for example, does not agree with the ADL’s tightly-laced definition of anti-Semitism, but he still asserts that the words “Zionist” and “Jew” have become so conflated by anti-Semites, that most anything branding itself anti-Zionism is, indeed, actually, just anti-Semitism.
Are you dizzy yet? I know I am.
My point is this: it has become virtually impossible for your average American to critique Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism. Which is probably why most of us who think of ourselves as well-meaning do not try. It is why I stopped talking to my friend Rebekah about it for 10 years. How can we talk about Israel in well-intentioned discourse if we can’t even agree what Zionism is, what anti-Zionism is, and which of those is anti-Semitic, or not?
There seems to be no concise language or word that encompasses being both pro-Jewish safety and pro-Palestinian rights. Which is pretty ironic, considering I think it’s what most of us actually want.
In the absence of shared language, can we give each other grace? Will someone believe me when I say I don’t wish them harm, even if I’m saying it with language they may interpret as harmful? Can they trust that I’m actually trying?
But, then again, I don’t always try. A lot of us don’t. I want to speak out about the disturbing things I see the IDF doing inside Gaza, or the impunity with which Israeli settlers attack Palestinians in the West Bank, but when I do, I am often met with a barrage of “whatbaoutisms” from the Israeli history of violence. Instead of acknowledging these horrific stories and asking my conversation partner to then meet me on the idea that all ethnically-motivated violence is bad, instead, I allow myself to become dizzy from the barrage of historical details about Israel that I was never taught in school; feel sheepish and ignorant because I realize I don’t know anything about Jewish trauma; get nervous about speaking ill of the people my ancestors were supposed to have heroically saved in WWII, and often, instead of risking sounding anti-Semitic, I decide to simply not speak at all, because it’s easier to believe people when they tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about.
As if you need perfect historic facts to want mass violence to stop.
The irony, of course, is that if we cannot talk ill of a democratic government, then we are not actually talking about a democratic government. We are talking about an authoritarian one.
Nobody understands this better than Israeli journalists, by the way, who write nuanced, searing critiques of their own government all the time, in Israeli papers that almost no American ever sees. As far as I can tell, the Editor in Chief at Haaretz wakes up every morning, writes “tear Netanyahu a new asshole” at the top of his daily agenda, and loves his job.
Meanwhile, when I write “Netanyahu is on the wrong side of history,” on an anti-war Instagram post, I get a DM from a well meaning American acquaintance telling me how hurtful and harmful it is to say “Israel is on the wrong side of history.”
I lay in bed and blink at the message. She does not see the difference.
Or maybe she just does not trust that I do.
Why We Can’t Trust Each Other to Mean Well
The trouble of course is that when people like my college roommate get nervous around how non-Jews talk about Israel, they aren’t being paranoid. They’re being judicious.
As violence in Gaza has risen, so has anti-Jewish bigotry. Many of these hate crimes are not enacted by pro-Palestinian protesters, but far right extremists — who, to be clear, do not represent Palestinians. They represent white supremacy. Also, if you classify the term “Free Palestine” as hate speech, which the ADL now does in its statistics, then a whole bunch of queer, non-white, pro-immigrant, proto-communist students who want nothing more than to retire on polyamorous weed communes suddenly poof into Nazis — and call me naive, but I think that’s going to skew the data.
With that said, the bullying and harassment of Jewish people that we’ve witnessed during the pro-Palestine protest movement is undeniable. A disturbing number of justice-seeking liberals will not even pause to ask themselves if their pro-Palestinian activism is feeding Jewish violence before they engage. They are too busy bristling at a perceived double standard: when Israelis use mass violence to defend themselves, it is righteous, but when Palestinians do it, they are “animals.” To the pro-Palestine protesters, Palestine is David, and Israel is Goliath — and there is no obligation to care about Goliath’s feelings. From their perspective, Jewish people should be using their Judaism to speak out against Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinian people, or they are complicit in those atrocities. Naomi Klein’s concept of the victimizing victim, which she writes about in Doppelganger (and you can read for free, here) is inconceivable. Or even, I don’t know, just letting individual Jewish people have different relationships to their identity? Instead, Jewish people are getting bullied because the people bullying them assume they are bullies. This scenario reeks of scapegoating — something that Jewish people have been experiencing for millenia, from whatever ethnic majority they have been living under — as an excuse to harm them. It’s difficult to believe that this bullying is now some advocacy for disenfranchised Arabs, rather than a bellwether for darker hate crimes, which it classically always has been.
It’s not clear to me, a goy, when a Jewish person is allowed to feel safe in this world.
However, if we follow the temptation to view all pro-Palestinian activism as de facto anti-Semitism, then Palestinian activists never have a chance to be taken seriously when they speak about Palestinian issues. These include: the fact that Palestine is home to the largest number of child amputees in the world; that Palestinian homes are still routinely bulldozed in the West Bank, while new Israeli settlements are built; that Palestine does not control its own water or trade; that Gazan doctors have had to pick which babies will live or die in their collapsing healthcare system, and that Gazans are dying, right now, in a famine openly orchestrated by the Israeli government.
I do not know how to talk about these things without genuinely worrying that someone I care about is going to think I am sympathizing with terrorists. This is so absurd, it should be funny.
But it’s not funny, because I saw a Gazan baby with its head blown off the other day and wasn’t sure who I could talk about it with.
How to Stop Fighting
How do we honor generational trauma while seeking generational peace? Why does it seem to be so hard? Why am I so scared to talk about this even now? I am writing an essay about the dangers of staying silent for fear of being misunderstood, and I am terrified to publish it, for fear of being misunderstood.
A few weeks ago, I saw a comment on @jewitches’s Instagram account in which a Jewish woman wonders aloud if the Jewish people are in fact God’s chosen people, here to teach the rest of humanity one single lesson: tolerance. That if we abuse a group of people for no other reason than their lack of assimilation into the mainstream, our collective punishment will be endless suffering.
If Israel is the only place Jews are safe, then we are both pre-supposing the unwillingness or inability of any other government to protect Jewish citizens. By admitting that we know they won’t do that — that only Israel will do that — we both absolve our own governments of that job, and we enshrine the ethnostate status of Israel forever. Will Americans keep American Jews safe, or just outsource it like we do everything else? Will Americans keep American Jews safe, or use them as a scapegoat for right wing erosion of free speech?
You cannot un-convince me that the only people benefitting from this war are the people making weapons. I do not think most Jews feel safer. Palestinians certainly do not feel safer. I am a white gentile American citizen sitting in front of a computer in California, and I do not feel safer.
We tell ourselves we don’t know how the conflict can end. But there are many people who have been fighting this cyclical violence for some time. Most of them are Jewish and Arab people, living in Israel or Palestine or America or beyond. Despite (or perhaps, because of) their intimate experiences with mass generational conflict, they work to bring it to an end. They know the conflict isn’t going to stop until enough people speak up and state that they want it to stop.
Journalist Clint Smith asks “How Do You Forgive the People Who Killed Your Family?” in a 2024 Atlantic article covering the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. At one memorial, you can see 20 human corpses suspended in cylindrical glass tubes. One contains a 5 year old boy, in a light blue shirt with a faded pink elephant on the front. You can lean forward, and see the blow to the head that killed him. You can lean forward and see the child’s brain.
Israelis and Palestinians are no strangers to the gruesome realities of mass conflict. But I do think it’s worth noting that Palestinians don’t have passports to visit European concentration camps, and most regular Israelis won’t (or rather, can’t) hop over the wall to visit the mass graves at Gaza’s Nasser medical complex. I think if I had to walk past the soft, preserved bodies of dead children every day, whatever chromatic shine that I used to see in violence would start to lose its luster. It already is. Israeli soldiers are coming back from tours in Gaza with record levels of PTSD. Most people in Gaza do not support Hamas; most people alive in Gaza didn’t vote for Hamas. Most Israelis do not support Netanyahu.
But it still feels like we aren’t seeing the same dead bodies.
At the end of 2023, I met Rebekah for brunch in Berkeley. I cooed at pictures of her children over plates of pancakes. We talked about our gardens and gossiped about mutual friends. Then she confessed how disturbed she was at my recent social media posts defaming the Israeli military response to October 7. More importantly, she told me how abandoned she felt that no one had reached out to her after the massacres to ask how she was doing; once again, none of her non-Jewish friends had considered how she, an American Jew, might be affected by what happens in the Jewish homeland. Like in 2010, I felt I had failed her as an ally.
Then, inevitably, we began to go back and forth about Israel and Palestine’s respective right to defend themselves. My pulse began rising. I couldn’t hide my shock that she still refused to see Israel as an apartheid state. She said she knew Israel was not above critique. And yet there seemed to be no way for me to critique it without putting her on edge. So, I gave up. I said what I was really thinking.
“The way Palestinians have been treated by Israel is wrong,” I said, my hands shaking around my coffee cup. “Israel controls everything. They have more money, more power, more weapons. Yes, Hamas is evil. But you can’t actually expect Palestinians to stop fighting against their own oppression.”
She held my gaze and said, “And what is Israel supposed to do? Hamas has promised to kill all Jews. What do you think will happen if Israel stops defending itself? I am wondering if I need to pull my kids out of school right now while you wax on about world peace. What exactly is your solution?”
I froze. I didn’t have a solution; I hadn’t memorized the names of the diplomats and the treaties and the peace strategies that had been proposed again and again, and rejected again and again because not enough people could agree on them.
I rummaged around in my head, and landed on the only thing I had left to offer that I could be certain about: my feelings.
“Don’t you want the fighting to stop?” I said, quietly.
“Of course I do,” she replied, leaning forward. “I want that more than anyone. I just don’t know how that starts.”
I felt I finally understood something I wish I had realized in 2010. I didn’t need to agree with her. I only needed to show her that I would not walk away from her when she told me she was afraid; that I would stand up for her safety, no matter what. Did I know how to do that? Really?
“I don’t know how that starts either,” I said. “But I think — no, I know — that solution is out there. Maybe we don’t have to agree on who started it, or who is responsible for putting down their gun first. I don’t think we will ever agree on these things. But can we meet in the middle? And the middle is we both know we don’t want this?”
